by Nick Hollin
He used to think he was smarter than this, smarter than the criminals who would ramble on to hide a lie only to give away another truth. Home has certainly been playing on his mind – not the one in Scotland; that’s barely a home at all, just a place to hide away and wait – rather the place where he once had a family, where he wasn’t alone.
He’s tempted to tell her about his brother, to offer at least a little, but Katie’s own lack of certainty holds him back. For so long he’d lived for her belief. Once he’d taught her how to look, she’d seen the good in him as clearly as she’d seen the bad in others. It was only when he’d stood over that headless corpse, its end drawn out in so many agony-filled ways, feeling like he was standing on the edge of a limitless black hole, that he’d lost the strength to even act like he was going to be okay. And yet… and yet, now that they’re back together and she’s joined him in his crisis, he’s finding a different strength, ready to play another essential role.
‘I’m sorry for not showing you who I really was,’ he says. ‘But I’d been pretending for so long before I met you, with everybody I met, even with…’ His head drops, but he immediately lifts it back up, closing out the memories and moving on, just as this new, tougher version of himself he’s created would. ‘I thought it was the only way to hold on. Towards the end, though, I was starting to…’ His hands are free and curled in front of his face, as if trying to shape the feeling that’s taken hold of him: a feeling that can be described in a single, impossible-seeming word that he finally manages to push out. ‘Trust.’
Katie turns back to him, and he can see the hurt in her eyes. ‘We were so close,’ she says, with an aggression that he fully understands.
‘The closest I’ve ever been,’ he says. ‘But beyond all this superficial shit,’ he grabs the front of his borrowed T-shirt and flicks his head towards the room around them, ‘we do know the truth about ourselves. We will always have our own secrets. And we will always seek to uncover other people’s.’
‘Always?’ says Katie.
‘I don’t know about the future,’ he says, looking away. ‘I guess that’s been the problem all along. But I do know what I’ve done in the past. You don’t need to trust me fully, you just need to trust me enough for us to make this work. One more time.’
* * *
Ten minutes later and he’s sitting at the breakfast table finishing a second bowl of cornflakes. He looks around the tiny flat, watching Katie as she stands at the sink washing up dishes that have clearly been there for days. He notices the number of wine glasses too, several in pairs, dotted around the room.
‘Do you have friends over much?’
She spins quickly, almost dropping the dish she’s holding, wearing an expression that he takes to be guilt. ‘Why?’
‘It’s none of my business,’ he says, holding up his hands by way of apology. He lowers them and drags a well-chewed fingernail over the surface of the table, following a snaking groove, amazed at how personal this has suddenly become. ‘And given it’s only a couple of days, it’s probably best that we don’t—’
‘You weren’t the only one trying to forget about things,’ she says, cutting him off. ‘I just chose a more sociable route.’
He’s surprised to find his cheeks flush as she lowers her head and drags down her white shirt, the front of which has been splashed with soapy water. He wants to move on, to move away from this awkward situation, and so turns back to the small talk. ‘How’s your dad?’
Her shoulders slump, and this time she lets go of the plate in her hands. He hears it sink to the bottom of the water. Once again he knows he’s got it horribly wrong, making a mistake he would never have made before, back when he was switched on and tuned in, when he knew that stepping beyond the professional world was guaranteed to bring them both pain.
‘He’s been sick for a long time, long before you left, but it was one more thing I was blind to. This last year…’ Her shoulders drop further. ‘The deterioration has been so rapid, faster than the doctors could ever have imagined, like he’s given up. You remind me of him. When you’ve gone off to wherever it is you go. That’s why I can’t stand it. I can’t have you living on the other side of that wall. Not if we really do only have a couple of days.’
He instinctively looks at his wrist. It could almost be mistaken for a glance at his watch, to check the time, and in a way, that’s exactly what it is: a reminder that it’s running out. He flips the wrist over and stretches his arm across the table. He wants her to turn round, he wants her to take his hand, he wants to offer comfort, to convince her that she’s going to be okay, he wants to have some strength to share but, in the end, all he has is regret and the same old words that have haunted him for so long. So sorry to have left you alone.
‘I should have recognised his Alzheimer’s far earlier,’ says Katie. ‘At least then I could have said what I needed to while he still understood. I could have eased my conscience, made it easier for myself.’ She laughs again and shakes her head. ‘Easier.’
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
On this occasion, he can tell he has said the right thing because she turns towards him with half a smile, not seeming to care about the water dripping from her gloves.
‘Don’t go.’
He should have seen it coming. Perhaps he had, perhaps he’d wanted to hear her say it; although now that she has he wishes she hadn’t.
‘It’s not just faith in my instinct that faded while you were away.’ She stands in front of him, pushing her shoulders back and brushing a stray strand of hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear. She had always been beautiful. The rumours of a romance between them had spread quickly, an obvious way to explain the closeness between them, and on weaker days, on days when for just a moment he forgot himself, Nathan had started to imagine it too.
‘It’s only since you’ve come back,’ Katie continues, ‘that I’ve started to remember there might have been more.’ The two of them stare at each other for a moment, neither blinking, neither seeming to breathe. Then Katie turns away. For a moment he thinks she’s going to reach for a bottle of wine, perhaps even finish the dregs of one of the old ones on the side, but her hand darts to the right at the last second, picking up a glass which she then fills with water. She takes a big swig and then returns to him, peeling off her marigolds and offering an enthusiastic nod. ‘Right,’ she says, clapping her hands together, as she would always do to silence the room back at work. ‘It’s time to hear your insight.’
‘It was never insight,’ he says, spreading his hands out on the tabletop and slowly pushing them away, trying to knead out the tension he can feel building again. ‘Just a dark imagination.’
‘A gift.’
A nail catches on a groove in the table and he continues to pull, enjoying the tug of flesh. ‘A curse.’
‘You could see somebody,’ she says hesitantly. ‘I have. It helped, for a while.’
‘You gave up?’
She runs a hand down either side of her trousers as if ironing out non-existent creases. ‘I made a mistake.’
Nathan spots the tiniest look across at the bedroom door, and he thinks he understands. A silence settles over the room. In the distance he can hear the steady stream of traffic, and he’s reminded that it’s not just him and Katie: there’s a whole city out there, millions of lives, all with their own complications, secrets and desires.
‘I’m not sure I can go to the station again,’ he says, gripping the edge of the table, his bare feet pressed firmly to the floor. ‘But I need to see everything we have on this case.’
‘Fine.’ She gestures for him to move towards the kitchen door and he does so, passing very close to where she’s standing.
Joining him in the living room, she points to another door that he’d somehow missed before, part hidden behind a colourful drape. She moves across and pulls it back, drawing out a key from behind a stack of paperbacks on an overcrowded bookcase. They’re adult bo
oks, thrillers by the looks of it, and he finds himself giving them a wide berth, even though he suspects that what’s beyond the now-open door, in the darkness that’s been revealed, will be far more dangerous.
Fourteen
Katie lifts a finger towards the light switch, before quickly withdrawing it, suddenly convinced she’s made a terrible mistake.
‘On second thoughts, I’ll bring the stuff out to you,’ she says, trying to block him with her arm.
But he’s already moving past, stepping through the doorway into the darkness. She reaches out to pull him back, as if this black hole might absorb him for ever, but he slips through her grasp. He flicks the switch and the room ahead is flooded with the blinding light of a naked bulb. She lifts a hand to shield her eyes, then lowers it to cover the whole of her face.
She doesn’t need to see the room; she can place every item in it in her head. Unlike the rest of her flat, everything is exactly where it should be. In the centre is a swivel chair, lopsided and broken, discarded from someone’s office at the station. The floor is bare wood, sanded down and painted white. The walls are also white, but there are only occasional glimpses of it. Floor-to-ceiling – and parts of the ceiling – are covered in photos, printouts of data, maps and reports. There are many flashes of colour, with little bits of tape and string, and plenty of red on the images. Tucked in the corner is a metal filing cabinet, another reject from the office, from a time before computers took over, back when she was new to the job and she believed she would solve every case. The room is so tiny that when she stands in the middle and spreads her arms she can practically reach each wall. She remembers the day she first looked around the flat, how the letting agent had tried to hurry her on, waving her past what seemed to him little more than a walk-in cupboard, saying a few words about storage space. But the windowless room had struck a chord with Katie, and she’d pushed her way past the agent, standing with the light off, picturing how it might eventually be.
She feels as if she ought to offer an explanation to Nathan, something to make her feel a little less exposed, but when she removes her hand from her face and turns to him, she realises he’s likely suffering far more than she is. He’s looking at the forensics from a case that fills almost half a wall: lab reports; phone logs; witness statements; handwritten notes and, at the centre of it all, the photos. Some show the head. Some show the body and the curls of peeled skin. And one colour image shows a hand, the wedding-ring finger of which has been snapped back.
‘You never caught anyone?’ he says, without looking across.
She realises now that he hasn’t asked before, even though the Steven Fish murder must have been on his mind from the very moment they met. One more thing he’s been holding back.
‘I tried,’ she says. ‘Everything.’ For all the unsolved cases in this room, this had seemed the most important because it represented the start of her decline. She’d thought if she could solve it that the others would follow; that her confidence, and her instinct, would return.
‘What are all these?’ asks Nathan. He continues staring, unblinkingly, at the photos.
‘Cases from the past year,’ she says, before adding quietly, ‘unsolved.’ She points at the nearest, hoping to pull Nathan’s attention away. ‘This was a man in his seventies who had his throat slit on the way back from visiting his wife’s grave.’ He was the first of the year’s failures, and she remembers clearly the frustration at having to move on, and how even then she’d felt like something inside of her was slipping, like she was losing control of something fundamental. ‘This,’ she continues, stepping to her right and jabbing a finger noisily against another image, ‘was a teenage boy who was shot in the stomach. We were close to an arrest, but I…’ She lowers her head again, shaking it slowly.
‘Throat and stomach.’
Katie looks across at Nathan and can see he has finally left the image of the hand and is staring at the latest additions, photos and documents that have covered up others. The light above almost seems to have been angled in on them, bringing out the vivid red of the blood. Nathan leans towards a photo of the body of Sally Brooks.
‘I’ve made the connection, of course,’ she says. ‘But I don’t think it was the same man.’
‘It can’t be,’ he says, vigorously shaking his head. ‘But I do think he is mocking you for these failures.’
She shoots Nathan a look, unable to suppress her anger. ‘You think you could have done better?’
‘I think we could, yes.’ He turns back to the image of the teenage boy lying on the filthy floor of an alley, still clutching his stomach as he’d watched his life spilling out of him.
‘It’s not too late,’ says Katie.
‘This case,’ says Nathan, lining himself up with Sally Brooks again. ‘One final case, like we agreed.’
‘Fine,’ says Katie, with another flash of anger. ‘But to solve it we can’t afford to shut ourselves off from the others. What if he’s doing this because of something we were involved in years ago?’
‘You mean a relative?’ says Nathan, a suggestion he seems to instantly regret.
‘Perhaps of someone we put away, yes,’ says Katie. She’s already worked her way through that lengthy list, but she knows there might have been something she missed.
‘I don’t think so,’ says Nathan, his voice suddenly sounding distant. ‘I believe it goes further back than us.’
‘What makes you say that?’ she asks, although she already has a suggestion, taking her back to a place she’d sworn she wouldn’t go. ‘The clue in the toaster? The toast? Are you talking about your childhood?’
Nathan doesn’t say a word. He’s within reach; he couldn’t be anything else in this room. Katie has to fight the urge to grab his shoulder and reverse him, to look into his eyes and demand he do what she’s far from willing to do herself – to talk about the distant past.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, eventually. ‘I had a thought. But I was wrong.’
‘Don’t you fucking dare!’ she says, leaning in. ‘I brought you here, I showed you my failings, showed you how I couldn’t fucking cope without you. Why?’ She doesn’t wait for the answer, although he might well be able to give it, knowing her as well as he does. ‘Because nothing else matters.’ She moves in close so they’re both just inches from the picture of Sally Brooks. ‘Nothing matters but making him stop.’
‘Exactly,’ he says quietly as he turns and walks out of the room. ‘Which is why we need to go.’
‘Where?’
‘The last place in the world I ever wanted to return to.’
Staring at the back of his head, she’s again reminded of how little she knows about this man. While she’s always been thorough in researching her work, considering every last detail in an attempt to understand the whole, with personal matters she’s barely scratched the surface. She doesn’t need a professional to tell her why, although the one she’d been casually speaking to at her dad’s care home had made it nice and clear. And it’s in considering that man’s words, the source of her own pain, and the places to which she would least like to return, that the answer comes to her, accompanied by the image of six words scribbled in thick ink on a scrap of square-lined paper: Home is where the heart is.
Fifteen
Perhaps it was inevitable that he would come back to this place; it might have been his plan all along to return one last time before his three days were up. Or perhaps he’s answering a genuine concern that someone else has been here, raking through his past to use it as a weapon against him, making him think unthinkable things, to believe he might have committed these crimes. And then to start imagining something far worse.
The house is a huge Georgian property on top of Richmond Hill, not more than two minutes’ walk from the park. Nothing seems to have changed since he was last here. He’s amazed and in a way disappointed to see the front door hasn’t been caved in and all the contents taken. It would have been obvious to any burglar scouting potential ta
rgets that the car in the front drive, an ageing Citroën, hadn’t moved in a long time, and peering through cracks in the dusty curtains would have revealed that the house had been unoccupied for just as long. Maybe it was the garden that had saved the place, the immaculate lawn and carefully maintained flowerbeds giving the impression that someone was still around to care. Perhaps the old guy they’d employed to come once a week had been mistaken for the owner. He had, from Nathan’s memory, looked like the sort of eccentric who might live in squalor on the inside while maintaining a kind of splendour on the outside. Whatever the reason, the house looks untouched and so, realising he still needs a key, he lifts a plant pot containing a recently deadheaded rose and slips one out from underneath.
Even after the door is unlocked he needs to use his shoulder to barge it open, such is the mountain of post behind it. There must be menus for every restaurant in the area, many of which will be long out of business; there are local papers, for which he imagines the same is true; there are bills, letters, postcards, presents, even leaves blown through the letterbox on the windiest of days; and there are large white squares, often lying in twos: one for him, one for his brother. He swallows hard as he steps over a pair by the far wall, seeing a number 20 handwritten in the corner of an unopened card: a reminder not of the birthday that hadn’t been celebrated, but of the twenty years since he last entered the house. Yet more evidence of the perfect symmetry of it all.
As they move to the base of a small set of stairs, confronted by clouds of dust and a damp and musty smell, he looks across at Katie and wonders if she’s surprised by this place he’s brought her to. He has no idea how much she knows about his family. Before, he could almost have guaranteed it was nothing, but he knew she was more than capable of finding things out behind his back and the last year had given her every reason. His own particular skill for reading people assured him she would respect his wishes, as did the similar request for privacy she’d made in return.
